What’s the Deal with Praise?
We often hear that we shouldn’t praise our kids. We’re given alternative ways to comment on their accomplishments and creations. One suggestion is to make an observation (re: a picture they’ve drawn - “I like how you put the green over here”), another is to notice their feelings about it and reflect those back (re: a winning goal - “I can see how proud you are”). I don’t know about you but these kinds of responses always felt somewhat inauthentic to me; if my kid did something that they thought was great and was sharing it with me, I wanted to join with them in their celebration!
There is a compelling theoretical basis for not praising (or at least not effusively praising, applauding and gushing about every “accomplishment” big or small), but when we actually really understand the mechanism (spoiler alert: it’s counterwill) underlying these warnings, we can more skillfully navigate the waters of praise, without turning something that oftentimes feels so natural into something that is fully off-limits.
Why Not Praise?
The primary argument against effusive and frequent praise is that it can shift the motivation for doing the thing that is being praised [painting the picture, constructing the block tower, getting the A in AP Bio, sharing with one’s sibling] from inside our child (self-motivated) to outside our child (externally-motivated). [Another argument that is important to look at but that I’m not going to do here is that by making “everything” a cause for celebration, we send a message that “failure”, disappointment, seeing one’s limitations and making mistakes are intolerable experiences that must be “spun” into something positive - sort of the “everyone’s a winner”/participation trophy angle.] Being motivated from the inside is an important part of development; this “emergent energy”, as Gordon Neufeld calls it, is one of the keys to becoming one’s own person, knowing one’s likes and dislikes and, simply, being a healthy person.
When we understand the counterwill instinct, we can understand why too much praise can shut down someone’s internal motivation. Counterwill is the instinct that exists in all mammals to resist when we feel pushed, coerced or bossed around. Another way to put it is that when we sense that another person’s agenda for a certain thing is bigger than our own agenda for that same thing, our will to do it shuts down, even if we actually wanted to do that thing in the first place.
The Felt Tip Marker Experiment, a now-famous experiment conducted in the 1970’s, can be understood through the lens of counterwill. In the experiment a group of preschool children were put in a room with tables laid with paper and felt tip markers. A note was made of which children readily and eagerly engaged with the markers to draw pictures. Some of those eagerly engaged children were afterwards praised effusively for their drawings. When the children were put into the room a second time, those that had been heavily praised showed much less interest in the art supplies than they had the first time while those who hadn’t been praised continued to enjoy drawing. This shows that even though these children liked drawing when the adults’ agenda and investment in their drawing was experienced as bigger than their own intrinsic motivation, counterwill resulted. Their actions expressed the sentiment: You can’t make me draw.
When we understand praise backfiring through the lens of counterwill, it gives us a more nuanced way of approaching the “Do I or Don’t I Praise My Kid?” dilemma. Basically, we are operating in the “safe” zone, if our investment, joy or pride in the outcome is less than our kid’s investment, joy or pride and if our only “agenda” is to support our child’s emergent energy. I was relieved when I understood this because it gave more room for my authenticity in responses and for my celebration of things that they are proud of. For example, if my son is over-the-moon proud of his race time at a track meet, I can feel free to express the joy that I feel in seeing him so pleased with his accomplishment and can join in his celebration of his hard work paying off. There is no risk of my agenda feeling bigger than his. However, on another evening I chose to say nothing after my other son hopped out of his seat to hold the restaurant door open for an elderly man on crutches and then came back to the table and continued eating his meal. His action was entirely internally motivated — he didn’t view it as any sort of accomplishment and therefore wasn’t sharing it with me as such— and if I commented or expressed how proud I felt to have such a caring son, I would have run the risk of making my agenda feel bigger or more central than his. It would have been likely that counterwill would have kicked in and led him to think “well, I don’t want to just do what my mom wants me to do” in similar situations. In that situation, praise would have shined too bright a light on something that was done unselfconsciously and it would have shut down something that was beautifully - and quietly - his own.
Some New Guidelines
So for those of us who like rules and guidelines, we can now approach praise like this:
If our child is excited about and proud of what they’ve done, we don’t need to woodenly and awkwardly find something to comment about “(I saw how quickly your legs were moving in that race”), rather we can join their celebration (“That’s awesome! You have been hoping to break your record this season!! I’m proud of you!”). In fact, to not do that could be experienced by them as some sort of rupture or judgment on their joy.
If our child has under-the-radar done something that makes us proud–shared a cookie with their sibling all on their own, done something kind at school that the teacher told us about - we’d be wise to keep our mouth firmly shut. We can inwardly celebrate the fact that our child’s development seems to be unfolding in the benevolent and soft-hearted way that Nature intended, but we shouldn’t comment on it lest we muddy the waters by inserting our agenda into the situation.
Finally, a word of warning from experience: if your child has tried something new - maybe they tried a different art form, picked up a guitar and plucked out a song or sewed a shirt on a rainy day - and you want to encourage them to keep doing that thing (which would be squarely your agenda) so you heap some praise on them and tell them all sorts of other things they might try with the new hobby, expect the hobby to promptly disappear and to never be heard from again. Counterwill in action: when our agenda > their agenda.
So, there you have it, a more nuanced guide to praise that can help us to move through the murky territory that lies between applause for every small thing on the one side and tight-lipped silence in moments of great accomplishment on the other. Once again, an understanding of counterwill, the most impactful dynamic most of us have never heard of, can help us to navigate our relationships with our kids with more awareness and intelligence.
Note: It’s important to note that all of what I’ve said here about praise is equally if not more true of rewards. Using rewards (sticker charts, helpful student of the day, kindness award) absolutely shifts the motivation from intrinsic to extrinsic and actually inadvertently promotes selfishness (the child is doing the thing/exhibiting the behavior in order to receive something back).
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